For a bit of historic accuracy if it ever matters for future readers:
Kagi was founded in 2019 and we have operated for years in private beta with thousands of users before public beta release this June.
Goggles were not inspired by Kagi”s lenses and I can confirm seeing the whitepaper before we got the lens feature out last year.
Kagi”s Lenses were inspired by Blekko’s “slashtags” which is probably the original “prior art” for this kind of feature.
Looks like we arrived to similar idea, but different execution. Kagi”s Lens feature is osimple to create filter for the web, that anyone can make with a few clicks plus a bunch of powerful built-in lenses like “noncommercial” or “discussions” search.
We applaud all these innovations and are glad to see what is being done with Kagi Lenses and Brave Goggles. The Web ecosystem and users need innovations in search.
We are currently bringing this back (in Beta). RollYo innovated too (private Beta August 2005). Google Custom Search launched in October 2006. So there were at least 3 services that predate Blekko (2010).
I'm a paying Kagi user because doublequotes works, i.e. if I search for something using doublequotes around it, Kagi actually makes sure those words are in the page, and if it fails they create a bug report and fix it.
It seems to be better in every other way too, but that is actually the single reason why I pay for it.
That is what I corrected, assuming you meant we were announced to the public in 2022.
Kagi was announced to the public in 2019, long before public beta release this June. I understand it is kind of hard to track small, bootstrapped startups with no mainstream exposure, but as I said this is for historic accuracy.
Filter lists can be hosted anywhere and imported with the @ syntax:
# Make these domains stand out in results
+en.wikipedia.org
+stackoverflow.com
+github.com
+api.rubyonrails.org
# SPAM - never show these results
experts-exchange.com
# Pull filters from external source
@https://clobapi.herokuapp.com/default-filters.txt
This default list is the only one I distribute but users have come up with own lists.
It would be nice to have a Github repo with such lists (or meta lists: the @ syntax works recursively, allowing lists to import other lists).
Your suggestion of having a standard for the list syntax is interesting.
It's not necessarily hard to come up with this independently.
I hadn't heard of Kagi before until recently, and only just seen this Brave Goggle feature, but I had a very similar idea with my own search https://namusearch.com/ - Search using user defined url lists which can be publicly shared
I think I initially had the idea by thinking about uBlock but for Search.
From what I can see the Lenses feature only allows to specify up to 10 domains? (Screenshot in the article linked above). If that’s the case I don’t see how Lenses and Goggles are comparable.
Goggles allows to specify thousands of rules, not only on domain but also URL patterns and in the future matching on elements of the page as well (e.g. titles, etc.)
It is also not clear that Lenses predates the Goggles whitepaper. We’ve been playing with the idea of Goggles for a long time.
https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features